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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25955089">Garak's fault</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/o0Anapher0o/pseuds/o0Anapher0o'>o0Anapher0o</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Star Trek: Deep Space Nine</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Episode: s04e10 Our Man Bashir, Gen, No beta we die like Jem'Hadar, Pre-Relationship, the history of Julian's spy obsession</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 08:09:28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,135</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25955089</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/o0Anapher0o/pseuds/o0Anapher0o</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Before he met a certain plain and simple tailor Julian never had a specific interest in spy fiction. Now, four years later and stuck in a malfunctioning holosuit, he couldn’t help wonder what kind of program they would be in without his friendship to Garak.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Julian Bashir &amp; Elim Garak, Julian Bashir/Elim Garak</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>26</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Garak's fault</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>I’ve recently re-watched Past Prologue and it struck me just how clueless Bashir is in that episode. It seems almost impossible to believe that someone with a fascination with spies would be so painfully oblivious. I know early seasons’ Bashir doesn’t really do subtlety but really Garak wasn’t all that subtle.<br/>Then it occurred to me, what if Julian’s friendship with Garak wasn’t the result of his spy kink, but the cause.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It was all Garak’s fault. The thought had lodged itself firmly into Julian’s mind as he desperately tried to save his colleagues while simultaneously doing what he could to keep the damned Cardassian from killing everyone. It was definitely all Garak’s fault.</p><p>Not the transporter malfunction or the fact that most of the station’s senior staff was currently trapped in holographic form, of course. Not even Garak could be blamed for that. But for starters things would have been a lot easier if he hadn’t invited himself into Julian’s program.</p><p>That of course didn’t really touch on the deeper truth that, without Garak, they would not be here. Without Garak they would not play out some ridiculous period spy program. Without Garak, when Felix had asked him for suggestions for his first holonovel, Julian might have suggested something contemporary, maybe a social drama or a romcom. Heavens, he might even have suggested a tennis tournament. Something nice and safe, where no one threatened to destroy earth and no one was in danger of being killed.</p><p>But no, he made friends with the former spy and it had led to one of his intense bouts of obsession and somewhere down the line here they were.</p><p>It had started innocently enough, back when they had barely known each other, in the first months of their shared lunches. They had still played their little game of Julian trying to get Garak to admit that he was indeed a spy and Garak dodging his probing questions while they debated literature. Naturally Julian had gotten the idea of giving Garak a spy novel to try and tease a reaction from the Cardassian. Unfortunately he hadn’t known any spy novels at that point so the project had required some research. Within days it had exploded into a full blown obsession.</p><p>His first discovery had been that the field was huge. Pretty much every Federation world had fiction dealing with espionage as it turned out. Trill spy novels were fascinating in the way they dealt with the topic of joining. Andorian espionage thrillers had hit a golden age in the early twenty second century and offered a highly interesting perspective on their first decades of interacting with other species. In terms of humans, it seemed every historic conflict had spurred a new wave in the genre: The Cardassian Border war, the Klingon Wars and there were countless novels surrounding the first contact with the Vulcans. Julian had been fascinated. He had read and read.</p><p>That kind of obsession was nothing new to him. He often fell head over heel into some topic he found interesting and couldn’t tear himself away from until he had read everything he could get his hands on that was even tangentially related. It was part of what made him a brilliant researcher, especially since, other than a normal person, he could retain most of the information he absorbed for a long time. He was aware that this wasn’t the most normal behaviour, but neither was it completely unheard of, so he didn’t worry about concealing it. As long as nobody figured out at what rate he was consuming information he would be fine and usually the initial obsession wore itself out after some time. He would maintain a persistent interest and fondness for the topic, but the burning need to know everything mellowed down.</p><p>It had taken Julian about a month, between his job and reading Garak’s assigned Cardassian recommendation, to work his way steadily back through history and different species to twentieth century earth. He had skipped most of the twenty first considering the central conflict of that time was the augment wars (he had found a few good narratives from the beginning of the century though).</p><p>Then he had hit the cold war. He had to read up a little on the history of that conflict to understand the dynamics and ended up reading almost the entirety of Fletcher’s collected Essays on the Communist Manifesto in the process. But eventually he had cycled back to the spy fiction of the time. And wasn’t there plenty of it.</p><p>He had already encountered some of le Carré’s later works so he had started there and then moved in to Ambler, Deighton and finally Flemming. He never actually liked Flemming’s novels all that much. In fact he found the casual racism and homophobia, the rampant objectification of woman and the hero’s grim brutality mildly disturbing. Only when he discovered the films that had been made based on the character he began to understand why Bond had been so massively popular for nearly a century. Film Bond it turned out was indefinitely more charming than book Bond.</p><p>In the end he had never given Garak any of the hundreds of novels he had read. He had almost settled on one particular novel from the early twenty first century, when the incident with the wire had happened and that had kind of given the game away. Directly after that it hadn’t felt right to bring up the topic. So he had shelved the book for the time being and then his obsession with the topic had faded out as expected and he hadn’t thought about it until Felix had asked for inspiration. Suggesting he’d base his program on the old Bond films had sounded like fun at the time. Of course he hadn’t expected to be stuck in it with Garak himself of all people and with the rest of his friends as the other characters. And to be perfectly fair, he had had higher expectations for the program itself when he had volunteered to test play it, which only made Garak’s presence through all of it even more embarrassing than it would have been anyway. It turned out Felix as a brilliant programmer, but a dreadful writer.</p><p>Not that it mattered right now when they were all just about to be killed either by the program or by Garak apparently. Had he been alone, Julian would have had no doubt he could keep them alive until Edington and the others had fixed the transporter, but Garak represented a wild card he could never fully predict. Normally that was what made his interactions with the tailor so enjoyable but right now it was a risk factor he could have done without.</p><p>So Julian shot him and tried not to feel guilty about it. It did the job and Garak thereon after followed him like a lamb. Well, a rather snarky lamb , but at least he didn’t try to end the program anymore. And it was only a flesh wound, carefully aimed not to do any serious damage and he would treat it as soon as they could get out of this holosuit.</p><p>And after all, it was all Garak’s fault.</p>
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